4. Pinegrove - “Old Friends”

This track perfectly captures the ennui that so often infects and permeates young adulthood. It’s packed with an emotional apathy, simultaneously heartfelt and disaffected, like drifting through life untethered while gazing out through the blurred vision of anxiety and depression. We’ve all been there – lost and confused, unsure of where we’re going or who we even are. It’s the crux of realism and idealism, or rather childhood and adulthood. Of feeling helpless, and then feeling guilty about feeling helpless, and then feeling helpless to not feel guilty. It’s the self-perpetuating chain reaction of anxiety. Of being anxious about being anxious and slowly unraveling until you begin to question existence.

It’s why lines such as “I dont feel upset in a big way / there’s nothing really bad to be upset about” and “my steps keep splitting my grief / through these solipsistic moods” hit in such a poignant way. Emotions are wild, as are our thoughts. They’re not concrete like our muscles. We can’t flex them or stretch them out. We can’t see them and they don’t conform readily to the laws of movement and physics. They’re mercurial and transient. They have a life of their own, building upon and breaking against one another. We’re meant to control our thoughts with our thoughts – to control our brains with the very substance that they produce. It’s a flawed system, and it’s destined to breakdown at one point or another. All we can do is ride it out, persevere and gather up the pieces, hopefully growing and bettering ourselves while learning how to avoid similar pitfalls in the future.